A day at Southbank

One of the first 'artworks' we viewed. It said 'I AM HE', but it looked so close to 'LAME' when viewed from this angle that we should have realised it was a portent of the remainder of our Queensland Art Gallery experience.

On ANZAC day Gam and I went to Southbank with Mike and Bek. For a while we walked around and got smoked on by schoolkids wearing clothes that must be fashionable, along with all their makeup at once. One girl was wearing a dress no longer than a long-ish t-shirt that had a strategically placed mesh panel right at arse/crotch height. She had nice legs, sure, but even a miniskirt would have looked prudish by comparison. Another classic trend is Le Sack- attractive girls wearing something that looks like they've stolen the shower curtain from their parents' house to wear as a dress:

I'm not sure what made these pictures so small. I was disappointed to have captured only the 'bag dress' this chick was wearing, and lost the fantastic detail of her bizarre haircut.

Some drunk Aussie guys walked past and posed with some delighted tourists. The real Aussie experience!
Once again, it would have been nice to capture the looks on their faces...

Then we went to the Queensland Art Gallery. I don't know what was worse. At least with the bogan kids we could sit around and have a laugh. It's been a while since I've gone to an art gallery, but apparently fun is strictly forbidden. As is carrying a bottle of water. Some timid little guy came up to us and announced that as we didn't have a bag to put our water bottle in we'd have to dispose of it. Bek came to our rescue and said we could fit it in her bag, but still... WTF?

We got approached so many times by people who wanted to tell us not to do stuff that when Gam seated himself on a bench in the middle of one room I quickly asked him to make sure there wasn't a sign saying "please do not touch" on the damn thing.

The Naughty Chair.

I made up for it by hopping down a set of stairs that made a lovely loud echo-y sound in the gallery, and got shot a dirty look by one of the employees. I'm actually quite a well-behaved, reserved kind of person, but being in such a stifling environment made me want to do all sorts of things to upset them. I managed to restrain myself, but I haven't ruled out going back and streaking through the gallery one day. Seriously, if you're not a stereotypical art-wanker type who can mime sipping a chardonnay and talk only through your nostrils, don't bother with the Queensland Art Gallery- you'll only feel uncomfortable.

I'm pretty sure my pointing out that this elephant is in fact painted with millions of tiny sperms and not 'bindis', as claimed on the blurb, was not appreciated by gallery staff. But seriously, each little 'bindi' the elephant was painted with looked like this:

Does that not look exactly like sperm? We christened the artwork 'Bukkake Elephant'.

The only other thing we learned from our visit is that the amount of wanky blurb for the artwork is inversely proportional to the talent of the artist. The Queensland Art Gallery has some nice stuff, but it's not a place for real people.

Oh, and never go to Southbank on a public holiday. It's awful. As locals we should have known better. It's a bogan-pit at the best of times, but this time there were crowds, there were brawls...